The Plural
15th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards
August 26–October 17, 2026
Seoul 03129
South Korea
DOOSAN Art Center DOOSAN Gallery presents The Plural, a solo exhibition by Yeoreum Jeong, recipient of the 15th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards from August 26 to October 17. The exhibition explores the indefinable logic of power across East Asian Cold War history—encompassing Korea, Vietnam, and extending along the Trans-Siberian Railway—and the individuals moving within it.
Yeoreum Jeong engages in long-term observation and research into places, tracing the layers of time within them. In her previous work, she has examined visual apparatuses and war technology to access places that could not be directly observed, comparing historical records with present-day landscapes to recover forgotten memories and discordant times. Crossing public archives with personal memories and speculative imagination, she has juxtaposed traces of different times and places within a single narrative.
Where does power come from? Who does power belong to?
Jeong’s new video work The Plural (2026) began with the discovery of an autobiography. The Person in question left his homeland in 1920s to find his father, embarking on a long journey. In Vietnam and elsewhere, he drifted amid the political vicissitudes that held East Asia in their grip.
The video adopts the language of documentary following the events described in the autobiography. Jeong also employs a narrator, excerpting moments when choices by the Person intersect with the waves of history. The screen shows footage of associated events and present-day places, weaving together images of different textures and proportions. Moving amid all of these are thousands of people who passed through the same time. The more distant the gaze becomes, the more the individual disappears, replaced by presences whose names and faces cannot be known.
While some individuals are reduced to masses in the video, others outside the frame were left with nowhere to return to. The figures in The Shepherd (2026) and Apron of the Low Place (2026) have either lost their purposes or never had them to begin with.
The speaker in The Shepherd suffers from bad underarm odor, which she inherited from her mother. Smell possesses the power to instantly summon memories of a specific past, but its meanings depend on the person encountering them and their circumstances. Holding onto only the substanceless traces of smell as proof of herself, she drifts through the landscape, seeking to lose her direction. She believes that through her movements, she provides the only kind of home available to her.
The speaker in Apron of the Low Place serves a master with hands that own nothing but are capable of grasping anything. But while they serve their master as all there is to life, the things they do to satisfy them ironically end up taking that life away. The unexpected movements of forces upend relationships and endlessly rearrange the individuals inside them.
The singular who make up “the plural” drift without names of their own. By what names might we call them? Yeoreum Jeong observes the people left behind where forces have swept through, and the many individuals who seek to break their own places. Through their movements, Jeong attempts to point toward someplace or something. No one can know what exists there or whether the direction is the right one. Landscapes pass by, bleached by the phantomlike word that is “everyday.” Yet there are still faces within. When the forces travel in different directions, all of us become witnesses to one another. It falls on us to find the language to name them.
Yeoreum Jeong (b.1994) reframes the story about a correlation between space and memory into visual language. She has held solo exhibitions at SeMA Bunker (2023), Hapjungjigu (2021), and her works have been presented including Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej (2026), DOOSAN Art Center (2024), Hite Collection (2023), and major film festivals including DMZ International Documentary Film Festival and Jeonju International Film Festival. She is a recipient of the 15th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards for Visual Arts (2024).
